Aside

Contact

Language Skills

Main

Sharla Gelfand

I am a statistician and an R and Shiny developer. My work focuses on developing tools that enable easier access to data (such as my R package, opendatatoronto) and replacing manual, repetitive work with reproducible and future-proof processes. I write about R at sharla.party and love contributing to open source.

Experience

R and Shiny Developer

Freelance

Toronto, ON

Jan. 2018 - Present

  • Development of Shiny applications, R packages, and reproducible workflows and reports for academia and public sector.

Statistician

College of Nurses of Ontario

Toronto, ON

Jul. 2018 - Sep. 2019

  • Developed reports and data tools on trends in Ontario nursing using Shiny and reproducible analytics reporting in R.
  • Analyzed data from surveys, disciplinary actions, and internal processes to guide College operations and influence nursing regulation and bylaws in Ontario.
  • Automated manual processes, reducing time to complete projects from months to days.

Data Analyst

Wattpad

Toronto, ON

Apr. 2017 - Jun. 2018

  • Lead analytics on a new product, Tap by Wattpad, defining content and product success metrics and developing team analytics standards.
  • Led A/B testing analysis and best practices, including Shiny app development to create a self-serve tool to enable stakeholders to analyze their own experiments.
  • Developed analytical insights to drive a better understanding of how to acquire, retain, and convert users.

Product Analyst

Unbounce

Vancouver, BC

Nov. 2015 - Mar. 2017

  • Defined data requirements for analyses to inform product roadmap and implementation, evaluate usage and adoption to best understand customers.
  • Contributed to and maintained warehouse databases by collecting data from disparate sources and auditing data to ensure reliability and integrity.


Education

Msc, Statistics

Simon Fraser University

Vancouver, BC

2013 - 2015

Bsc, Statistics (minor in Economics)

University of Calgary

Calgary, AB

2009 - 2013

Talks

Don’t repeat yourself, talk to yourself! Repeated reporting in the R universe

RStudio Conference

San Francisco, CA

Jan. 2020

Cleaning Federal Election Data

University of Toronto iSchool Data Cleaning Brown Bag

Toronto, ON

Oct. 2019

Demo’ing the opendatatoronto R package

Greater Toronto Area R Users Group

Toronto, ON

Sep. 2019

Opinionated Strategies for Uncharted Territories: Strategies for working with new data

GTA R Users Group and R-Ladies Toronto

Toronto, ON

Mar. 2019

Community

R-Ladies Toronto

Co-founder and co-organizer

Toronto, ON

Mar. 2019 - Present

Greater Toronto Area R User Group

Co-organizer

Toronto, ON

Mar. 2019 - Present